About Virginia Chihota

Artist Virginia Chihota works with drawing, printing, and silkscreen to evocatively portray the often marginalized bodies of African women. Chihota lived in Tripoli for several years and now works and lives between Tunisia, Austria, and Zimbabwe, which she represented at the 55th Venice Biennial. Her personal experiences living in Africa inform her work’s haunting and introspective contemplations of death, fertility, and isolation. Through rich, fluid color that appears to float atop the barren white page, Chihota captures the personal suffering that results from the political and social upheavals she witnesses in her home continent. Ultimately, Chihota hopes that her art will, in her own words, “nurture the love and respect which seems to have been frozen amongst ourselves.”